I'm sure everyone with a Macbook Pro has experienced the heavy heating and the fans sounding like they are about to take off. It's totally understandable when I run a GPU-heavy process such as video editing or gaming. My problem is that this is happening even with simple tasks such as web browsing or watching a video...

My understanding is that it is due to the Intel CPU doing all the work to save energy. Am I wrong? Then why even have a dedicated GPU! It's a shame that the algorithm to switch from CPU to GPU is not smart enough to avoid the overheating issues.

So I have two questions:

I've read that the Automatic Graphics Switching box in Parameters>Energy Savers lets you control if you want CPU/GPU or only GPU for all graphical computations. In the CPU/GPU mode, some algorithm (whitelist?) decides whether an application should run on the Intel or Dedicated GPU. Apparently it can't tell that Chrome should run on GPU rather than burning my laps... Is there a way to edit that list?

What is your software of choice to monitor/control this behavior?
Do you manually check/uncheck the box throughout your day? I'm trying out iStats Menus which seems great for monitoring usage. I've heard about gfxCardStatus, is it usefull? And finally i've read about various fan control apps but is it really a good idea to prevent the CPU from cooling down?

This seems to be a case of Apple trying to hard to simplify something that really wasn't complicated: nowadays if you're buying a laptop with a dedicated GPU you probably understand well enough the difference between the Intel on-chip GPU and a dedicated GPU performances to make this kind of decisions.

Can you please provide the actual model and specs of your MacBook Pro?
– Monomeeth♦Oct 3 '16 at 6:04

Just because the GPU has switched on, doesn't mean that it'll get hot. Have you tried an SMC reset? Check in Activity Monitor to see if there is a process that is using more CPU usage than expected.
– ThoughTooOct 3 '16 at 6:12

Please limit your posts to one question per post. That said, your second question is actually more like 4 questions, and software recommendations are off-topic.
– tubedoggOct 3 '16 at 19:01

I first quit the dropbox app, because according to the activity monitor, that app used a lot of CPU. It helped, the noisy fans were a bit less erratic, but still they went on making noise and my mbp got hot. After I deleted all obscure apps (that sometimes come with visiting a website), it is all back to normal.